Industrial construction booming in S.J. County

By Reed Fujii

Jun. 26, 2016

San Joaquin County developers have completed 6.7 million square feet of new industrial building space since 2013 and there’s another 6.6 million square feet currently under construction or in planning, San Joaquin Partnership officials said Thursday.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Brad Ecker, partnership client administrator. “We’ve got an explosion going on right now.”

But that space is in demand. One example is Amazon.com recently announced it would lease a 1 million-square-foot building in Tracy that developer Prologis built without an immediate customer in mind.

When business owners make decisions on opening new locations or expansions, they usually want to move quickly.

“You’ve got to have empty buildings out there,” Ecker said during the partnership’s regular board meeting Thursday morning. “Companies want to move now; they don’t’ want to wait two years, three years.”

Michael Ammann, partnership president and chief executive, said the development gives San Joaquin County an edge over other Northern California communities in attracting new businesses, and jobs.

There is limited industrial space in Stanislaus County to the south, a single building of roughly 500,000 square feet and some land open to development, he noted.

“There’s just no buildings available in Stanislaus,” he said.

Sacramento County to the north, likewise, has relatively little available industrial space.

As far as the East Bay Area, which long led Northern California in new manufacturing and warehousing development, is largely built out and the existing buildings are older, many unsuitable to today’s corporate demands.

And Ammann credited officials in Tracy, Manteca, Lathrop and Stockton, where much of the construction is occurring, for policies supporting that development.

“All the hard work out there in the communities is paying off for us and will pay off in the future,” he said.

The partnership’s report was based on figures from commercial real estate brokers Cushman, Wakefield and Jones Lang LaSalle, as well as its own records.

Among the largest completed projects were Amazon’s two, 1 million-square-foot distribution centers in Tracy; a 1.1 million-square-foot building for Medline, also in Tracy; a 746,000-square-foot warehouse for Clarion in Lathrop; Trinchero Family Estates 700,000-square-foot wine bottling plant and distribution center west of Lodi; and a 660,000-square-foot logistics center for FedEx Ground, in Tracy.

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